Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the least three, usually four—horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot; and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troubling the driver to think of me.
7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judée were mere pyramids of purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the 'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the 'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew. Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.
And on Thursday, the eighth or ninth day from Paris, days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud.
8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest
years of such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of education for youth;—and my certainty that a true knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[[25]] And of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort, whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges, west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do anything serious,—then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I
don't find a single note of its preferences or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.
9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of. In laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the scythe. And only on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show herself,—and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be mown the least trim during her time of disport there. So spared and indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.
10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and
presumably characteristic forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. If I could but write down the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. In the meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid illness, I must let this piece of 'Proserpina' break off, as most of my work does—and as perhaps all of it may soon do—leaving only suggestion for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.